The 'X' factor

Apr 22, 2005, 12.10AM IST

An earlier age compared the brain, not to a summer's day, but to an enchanted loom. In more prosaic times, it was likened to a telephone exchange, (wo)manned by zillions of neural operators. Closer to our times, computer became the most favoured model for the brain. Today, some scientists are likening the brain to an economic engine forged by natural selection through millions of years of competing for scarce resources.

As a major component in human sociality, more than anything, trade may explain the success of humans as a species." Anthropologists like best-selling author Jared Diamond, seemed to agree with the view of human nature that gives primacy to the Vaishya, trader-co-operative aspect over that of the 'Kshyatriya' or hunter-gatherer-warrior one.

Economists concede that mistrust and violence is in our genes. But abstract and symbolic thought permits us to accept one another as 'honorary relatives', they add. It's a remarkable arrangement that ultimately underlies every aspect of modern civilisation, says Toulouse University economist Paul Seabright, author of 'The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life' in a recent interview. "For our early ancestors to risk trusting each other must have been a huge gamble," he muses.

"Even if they could calculate the potential benefits of co-operation, the outcome was far from uncertain for our nature is quite violent. The first itinerant traders of pre-history may have lacked the panache of great warriors, but they are among the true heroes of our civilisation. Two things must have tipped the balance: need and familiarity. Those who succeeded, were perhaps only a few of those who tried, thrived and spread, and became the ancestors of everyone alive today."

Other theorists like Robert Trivers of Rutgers, argue that true altruism could even be an evolutionary 'mal-adaptation.' It arose in response to our needs when our ancestors lived in small tribal units.

Today, we may find it difficult to change our behaviour under vastly different circumstances in the modern world. In such a scheme, the globalising economy based on trade and commerce would be as much of an aberration as the global obesity epidemic. The latter is based on the all-too-human tendency of putting on extra calories as fat into our body banks, as a hedge against future famine and scarcity.

Apart from such theoretical speculations, scientists are also using practical brain scans and lab tests to map those brain areas, which are involved in the 'neuro-economics' of trust and betrayal. This involves studying people with head scans in simulated environments as they invest, buy and sell with trading partners (who are simultaneously scanned as well).

The researchers in the fledgling discipline believe they can discover how neural networks affect economic behaviour. The eventual goal is infinitely more ambitious and that is to understand how billions of individual decisions coalesce together at the macro-economic scale to affect national or global networks.